Vasily Mirovich Standing over the Body of Ivan VI at Schlusselburg Fortress

This is a Realist historical painting depicting the immediate aftermath of one of the more haunting episodes in Russian imperial history ,the murder of the deposed child-emperor Ivan VI in July 1764. Ivan VI was proclaimed emperor as an infant in 1740, deposed within a year, and then held in solitary confinement for over two decades. In 1764, Lieutenant Vasily Mirovich, a young officer with his own grievances against the crown organized a plot to free Ivan and proclaim him emperor in place of Catherine the Great. Unbeknownst to Mirovich, Ivan's jailers had standing secret orders to kill their prisoner rather than allow his release under any circumstances. The artist has captured that exact moment when Mirovich stands over Ivan's body having achieved nothing but catastrophe his coup succeeds in seizing the fortress and fails completely in its actual purpose. The dramatic power of the subject lies in the irony that an act of liberation results in death and a would-be kingmaker left standing over the very person he meant to crown. Ivan VI's life where he was imprisoned from infancy, murdered at 23, buried in an unmarked grave carries the charge of a "Russian Man in the Iron Mask." Tvorozhnikov's canvas doesn't dwell on the violence itself but of a conspirator confronting the wreckage of his own plot, which lets the painting as meditation on the futility of political violence and the ruthlessness with which the Russian state protected its throne.